Don't just talk about Israel

In talking about Israel, President Barack Obama has said its “security is sacrosanct” and that his commitment to Israel is “unshakable.”

Yet as Obama prepares his Sunday address to the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — the center of gravity of pro-Israel activism in the United States — the president faces the challenge of recasting a perception in the pro-Israel community that he is unsympathetic to the Jewish state.

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Obama is aware of this negative narrative. In fact, when relations with Israel and its supporters were rockiest in April 2010, the president sent an open letter to the Jewish community to set the record straight in the face of what he called “the noise and distortions about my views” toward Israel.

Unlike Obama’s speech Thursday at the State Department, White House spokesman Jay Carney said the president’s address Sunday will not be “a major policy speech” but a “talk about the deep bond between the United States and Israel.” In other words, the task at hand is for Obama “to get right” with the pro-Israel community as he gears up his reelection campaign.

Consider his last appearance at the AIPAC conference, in June 2008 — the day after Obama secured the Democratic presidential nomination. Much of that speech earned applause, especially when he said “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

But after an immediate outcry from Arab capitals, the Obama campaign spent the next 24 hours “clarifying” that he was not taking a position on how this “final status issue” should be resolved but merely saying Jerusalem must never again be “divided by barbed wire.”

Another seminal moment for many pro-Israel Americans was Obama’s June 2009 speech in Cairo to the Muslim world. While he included statements important to Israelis and their supporters — like a forceful repudiation of the Holocaust denial rampant in Arab countries — the president also sounded several tone-deaf notes to Jewish ears. The loudest seemed to suggest that the basis of modern Israel’s creation is the Holocaust — not the ancient biblical ties of the Jews to the Holy Land.

With these high-profile moments, U.S. supporters of Israel saw a steady diet of news portraying the president locked in a sour cycle with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.